Chilli planting

I’ve planted around 10 trees of chilli of various types at home for personal consumption, and for this bulk planting, it was intended for sale. In September last year, I bought some cili geronong (habanero pepper) and cili besar (chilli pepper) from Medan Niaga Satok, and took out the seeds.

These cili geronong seeds are so spicy that my hands still feel the heat after two days.

I sowed 60 cili geronong and 90 cili besar, and 10 cili padi (bird eye chilli) a week later, with total of 160 trees of chilli in 6 germination trays. I estimated around 70 – 80 percent of them will grow up to be able to be transplanted to our vacant land beside the plantation road in Kampung Segali.

I kept them within the car porch area, to allow it to receive only morning sunlight, and to prevent from rain. Gate netting was used to cover them because during this time, there were cats from the neighbours that came here and scratch on the soil inside the tray. I had to manually water them twice daily.

Two weeks after those chilli seedlings grew, I gave them NPK fertilizer (pink color), one small piece for each of tray hole. They grew well, except that they grew slanted towards sunlight, which caused me to move them outside of the car porch. I still kept the netting cover to prevent strong sunlight and heavy rain from damaging the plants.

Bad thing about putting these seedlings near soil area is they can easily get diseases. This was a few days before transplanting, I opened the cover to let the plants to adopt the natural sunlight & rain.Seven weeks after sowing, 60 cili geronong (100%), 75 cili besar (83%) and 6 cili padi (60%) were ready to be transplanted.Method that we used was to put the chicken manure as the fertilizer inside the hole on the ground first, before planting the trees. By doing this, the roots would be able to absorb the nutrients directly. Fertilizing schedule still continue at every 2 weeks. Those yellow bamboo are for plant supports.Four weeks after transplant, cili besar already started to flower.While cili geronong still growing its large leaves.

During last year Christmas, we went to check the chilli trees, and we were quite surprised to see the cili besar already bear some fruits. It took only 3 months for chilli to start producing results.

But we didn’t tie the plants to its support, which cause it to fall. Fortunately they didn’t die and still produce good fruits. We stopped putting fertilizer for now to prevent the fruit from rotting.Tied them all the next day.Harvested them a few times in January.

In the middle of February (last month), there were heavy rain for about a week that caused flood in our area. These chilli plants were also affected, some of them that didn’t grow tall enough were submerged. To make matter worse, the flood water was mixed with some diesel leaked from nearby lorry, and might affect the plants root.

A lot of cili geronong trees are tall enough that they survived the flood, and still producing good chilli.While a lot of cili besar were submerged, and their fruit are not that good anymore, perhaps need to wait for another round of pollination.3 cili geronong and 1 cili besar, all ripe. Going to sow their seeds again to ensure continuity.